FHE MASTER AND THE NEW AGE

teachings to his disciples as well as to outsiders. Though
the living image of Bhaktz, he never disparaged Jnanam.
He said, "Bhakti is the Sister ^nd^Jnanam is the^^rpther^

•^S^E^XPiL^^1*6.^6 whom you do not knowJ" Again,
'when like Chaitanya he had cognizance of the tremendous
need of the Shastric guidance, his constant counsel to his
followers was to see for themselves that the Principle of
Causality in Modern Science is not out of court in the
whole field of our Shastric literature. Reason, he knew,
never disproves the infallibility of the Shastras, but shows
that there is in the old, old path a newness waiting for
those that seek it. They are old, very old with a
Methuselah-long life-history, and yet they are new, never
in need of any adaptation to environments and circum-
stances. The Book of Religion is ever the same Book.
Each new Incarnation is the same Man. Turn over thef
musty moth-eaten pages of an ancient religious book, and¦
you will find in it a vitality, a germinative power tham
has kept each word alive.

The great founder of the Brahmo religion had surely
his allegiance to the Shastras, but as a student of the
Shastras, he was a law unto himself and never liked that

•anybody should allow himself to be led by the nose. In
strongest terms, he repudiated dteapGjJ^

more an evil than a good.^ The later Brahmos forgot the
impregnable bulwark of the scriptures and accorded to
Reason the highest and most sacred niche in the Brahmic
view of life. Absolute conformity to the Shastms was
to them nothing short of a sheepish slavery proper, not
to the enlightened but to the country bumpkins with their
tendency to fatuous imitation, although their glorious

which, he praised but once, in Tuhfat-ul written in the
predecessor (Rammohun) never advocated free reasoning,

255